With the Olympics now over and in the wash being considered as to why we won so few gold medals and why we should care so much anyway, I produced an efficiency chart on how much winning each side did per entrant entered. This will be good for the bean counters who need to justify the expenditure. I remember a British sporting official saying they budget £20 million for each gold medal. I do not know though how much they spend for silver or bronze but this works out to £580 million for 29 gold medals.
For purely selfish reasons I will talk about the countries of my ancestors – Great Britain, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Greece and Australia.
For Gold Medals, China ties with Grenada with 1 gold medal for every 10 entrants. Great Britain comes in at 11th needing 18 entrants and Australia manages 40th needing 58. Sadly, Greece, Malaysia and Singapore did not manage to win any gold medals.
For a simple grand total of medals, Botswana comes first needing 4 athletes per medal, China was 4th needing 4.3 athletes per medal, Great Britain came 17th needing 8.3 athletes, Singapore came 32nd needing 11.4, Australia was 33rd needing 11.8, Malaysia 50th needing 14.9 and Greece 81st needing 53 athletes for a single medal.
Now if we give the medals points, Gold 5 points, Silver 3 and Bronze 1 we get the following: China comes first needing 1.3 athletes per point, at 13th Great Britain needed 2.5 athletes per point, at 29th Australia needed 4.3 athletes per point, at 60th Malaysia needed 7.5 athletes per point, at 72nd Singapore needed 11.5 athletes per point and at 84th Greece needed 52 athletes per point.